A wheeled mobile robot with trailers has been studied as a class of nonholo
nomic systems. It is proved that a system of a tractor and trailers with an
appropriate connecting mechanism can be stabilized to desired positions vi
a nonholonomic motion control. Trailers, on the other hand, have been devel
oped and widely used in the industry. The main focus of industrial design i
s set on reducing tracking error from a reference trajectory. This paper at
tempts to bridge over the gap between these two approaches. We develop a de
sign theory of trailer systems with passive steering. The designed systems
show a good performance in practical path following, and accept the chained
form transformation and nonlinear control strategies for nonholonomic syst
ems.